40 Years After Capture, USS Pueblo Crew Reunites | Fox News 40 Years After Capture, USS Pueblo Crew Reunites Published September 06, 2008 Facebook 0 Twitter 0 Email Print JERICHO, Vt. – Ralph McClintock expected only a three-week mission when he boarded the USS Pueblo in January 1968. Instead, he and his shipmates became pawns in a Cold War sideshow when North Korea captured the Navy spy ship and imprisoned its 82 crew members. Some still suffer the physical effects of torture or malnutrition they suffered in 11 months of captivity. McClintock is proud of his service as a 24-year-old communications technician and the bonds he made with his crew mates, but that pride is tinged with bitterness. "We were treated as heroes when we got back, but what the Navy, the institution of the Navy really wanted, in my opinion, is the Pueblo to have sunk," McClintock said at his Jericho home.

"When we came back, the Navy now has to look at itself and they don't like to look at themselves." On Wednesday, 40 of the 69 surviving crew members will gather in neighboring Essex for a four-day reunion featuring exhibits and speeches by experts on U.S.-Korean relations. McClintock, the host for the reunion, isn't the only one who is disillusioned. "I think the crew has always wanted someone in the Navy to stand up and say 'Hey, you guys did a great job in a poorly conceived mission without any backup,"' said Skip Schumacher, 65, of St. Louis, a lieutenant junior grade on the ship. Their capture was almost overshadowed in a year that saw the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. "This was a difficult and humiliating event," said Mitch Lerner, who teaches American diplomatic history at Ohio State University and wrote a book about the Pueblo. "It wasn't just an American ship that was captured. The crew was beaten and publicly humiliated and the U.S. couldn't do anything about it," said Lerner, who will speak at the reunion.

The crew kept the military chain of command alive and resisted their captors. They planted defiant codes into forced letters of confession and extended their middle fingers when North Koreans photographed them and sent the images around the world. But when they came home, most of the young sailors acknowledged they gave the enemy more than their name, rank and serial number. "They've been living with that all these years," Schumacher said. A Navy spokesman, Lt. j.g. Thomas Buck, said no appropriate Navy official was available to comment on the criticisms of the Navy's handling of the Pueblo incident and its aftermath. McClintock, then a ham radio operator, volunteered for the Pueblo. He was accustomed to the spy-versus-spy culture of the Cold War, when American and Soviet naval vessels shadowed and occasionally harassed each other. On Jan. 23, after being harassed for a day, North Korean patrol boats opened fire on the Pueblo. The U.S. says the Pueblo was in international water; North Korea says it was in its territory. One sailor was killed by the gunfire. Lerner said the military's failure to protect the Pueblo wasn't sinister.

"The American government and the American military assumed this ship would be safe because the Soviets did similar things to us," Lerner said. "No one stopped to think the Soviet Union and the North Koreans were not the same thing." As prisoners, the enlisted men lived eight or so to a room while the officers had private rooms. "Your daily life is so bloody slow, it's like the time you were awake, instead of 12 or 14 hours, it feels like it's 40 hours. But when you go to sleep, it's total freedom, sleep instantly, soundly, never wake up until the next morning," McClintock said. "That's the freedom, just absolute freedom. The dreams are unbelievable. You dream of the good things." Lerner said U.S. officials realized military action would not have brought the crew home alive. "The praise that (President) Lyndon Johnson got for acting like a diplomat was really significant," said Lerner. The crew was released two days before Christmas. Soon after, the Navy formed a board of inquiry to investigate the loss of the ship and each crew member was interviewed. There was a recommendation that the ship's captain, Cmdr.

Lloyd "Pete" Bucher, face court martial for losing his ship even though he helped keep his crew together during captivity. Senior Navy officials nixed the court martial proposal. "It was a failure from beginning to end and to blame the men of the Pueblo and particularly the officers was really disingenuous and despicable," Lerner said. The Navy still lists the Pueblo as a commissioned warship, even though it's docked on the Taedong River in Pyongyang where North Korea holds is up as a symbol of resistance to American aggression. Lerner said there have been negotiations, some quite recent, to return the ship. McClintock, 65, looks forward to that day when the Pueblo comes home, as a way to honor their service and Bucher, who died in 2004. "Pete Bucher is buried in Fort Rosencrans (National) Cemetery on Point Loma in San Diego. It looks out on San Diego Bay," McClintock said. "Our dream is to see the USS Pueblo sail into San Diego Bay." Advertisement The Ongoing Story of USS Pueblo, with Executive Officer Edward R.

Murphy, Jr.: Citizen Soldier | Pritzker Military Museum & Library | Chicago Lt. Murphy was awarded two Purple Hearts for injuries he sustained during the capture of USS Pueblo and another for the injuries he sustained during the subsequent 11-month imprisonment. Record date: Tuesday, September 30, 2014 6:00pm The Ongoing Story of USS Pueblo, with Executive Officer Edward R. Murphy, Jr. Author and former Navy Leiutenant Edward R. Murphy Jr. shares his experiences as XO aboard USS Pueblo, the American spy ship famously captured and held by North Korea since 1968. Sponsored by Colonel (IL) J.N. Pritzker, IL ARNG (Ret.) and Act One Mayne Stage . In January, 1968, the lightly-armed and state of the art spy ship Pueblo was on its first mission to conduct surveillance on the Russians and North Koreans off the coast of East Asia. While in international waters, Pueblo's mission was compromised when it encountered North Korean fishing vessels. It was later captured by faster and more heavily armed North Korean warships after they opened fire, wounding several of the crew—one of them mortally.

Pueblo's 83 surviving crew members were held prisoner for 11 long months, during which time they were subjected to brutal conditions and relentless torture as they were interrogated by their captors and frequently punished for acts of defiance, some of which were shared by the media. Believed by the North Koreans to be the ship’s political leader, Executive Officer Edward R. Murphy, Jr. was singled out for special attention, was forced to make false statements, and was held in a cell next to the interrogation room where he could hear every brutalization of his shipmates. When the time finally came for the crew to be released, the North Koreans told Lieutenant Murphy that if anything went wrong, he would never go home. Thus, Lieutenant Murphy was the last to walk across the bridge into South Korea, carrying with him a great burden. Among the most significant compromises in the history of American military intelligence, the capture of the technically-advanced spy ship was the subject of an official inquiry and a source of embarrassment for all those involved. The details of the Pueblo Incident remain the subject of controversy and speculation even now—fueled in part by the vastly different perspectives of Pueblo’s Commander Captain Lloyd M.

Bucher, who died in 2004, and his second in command, Executive Officer, Lieutenant Murphy, both of whom published lengthy books about their experiences. And today, the Pueblo Incident reminds us no matter how technologically advanced our intelligence capabilities are, we are vulnerable if we are not vigilant. EDWARD R. MURPHY, JR. is a former lieutenant in the U.S. Navy and author of Second in Command: The Uncensored Account of the Capture of the Spy Ship Pueblo . A third generation Northern Californian, Murphy left to finish high school in St. Louis and later attended Principia College in Elsah, Illinois. Upon graduating in 1960, he accepted a commission in the U.S. Navy—ultimately serving nine years at various posts, including as the executive officer of USS Pueblo (AGER-2). He and his wife, Carol, live in San Diego, CA, where he remains actively involved in the veteran and nonprofit communities. Learn more by visiting his official website . DR.

JOHN ALLEN WILLIAMS, moderator, is a professor of Political Science at Loyola University Chicago, with degrees from Grinnell University (B.A.) and the University of Pennsylvania (M.A. and Ph.D.). He is a retired Captain in the U.S. Navy Reserves with a subspecialty in strategic planning, and a member of the Pritzker Military Museum & Library's Board of Directors . USS Pueblo (AGER-2) | Military Wiki | Fandom powered by Wikia 2 × Browning .50-caliber machine guns </td></tr> USS Pueblo (AGER-2) is an American ELINT and SIGINT [1] Banner-class technical research ship (Navy intelligence) which was boarded and captured by North Korean forces on 23 January 1968, in what is known as the Pueblo incident or alternatively as the Pueblo crisis or the Pueblo affair. The declassified SIGAD for the National Security Agency (NSA) Direct Support Unit (DSU) from the Naval Security Group (NSG) on the USS Pueblo during the patrol involved in the incident was USN-467Y.

[2] The capture, less than a week after President Lyndon B. Johnson 's State of the Union address and only a week before the start of the Tet Offensive , and subsequent 11-month prisoner drama were major incidents in the Cold War . North Korea stated that Pueblo strayed into their territorial waters, but the United States maintains that the vessel was in international waters at the time of the incident. [3] Pueblo, still held by North Korea today, officially remains a commissioned vessel of the United States Navy . [4] It was moored along the Taedong River in Pyongyang, and used there as a museum ship. Pueblo is the only ship of the U.S. Navy currently being held captive. [5] Contents Edit U.S. Army Cargo Vessel FP-344 (1944). Transferred to the Navy in 1966, she became USS Pueblo (AGER-2). The ship was launched at the Kewaunee Shipbuilding and Engineering Company in Kewaunee, Wisconsin, on 16 April 1944, as the United States Army Freight and Passenger (FP) FP-344.

The Army later redesignated the FP vessels as Freight and Supply changing the designation to FS-344. [6] The ship, commissioned at New Orleans on 7 April 1945, served as a Coast Guard manned Army vessel used for training civilians for the Army. Her first commanding officer was Lt. J. R. Choate, USCGR, succeeded by Lt. J.G. Marvin B. Barker, USCGR, on 12 September 1945. [7] The FS-344 was placed out of service in 1954. The FS-344 was transferred to the United States Navy on April 12, 1966 and was renamed USS Pueblo (AKL-44) after Pueblo County, Colorado on June 18 of the same year. The Pueblo is the third U.S. Navy ship to be named after the city of Pueblo or Pueblo County.

Initially, she served as a light cargo ship, AKL-44, but shortly after resuming service was converted to an intelligence gathering ship, or what is colloquially known as a spy ship , and redesignated AGER-2 on 13 May 1967. AGER (Auxiliary General Environmental Research) denoted a joint Naval and National Security Agency (NSA) program. [8] USS Pueblo incident File:Lloyd Pete Bucher.jpg On 5 January 1968, Pueblo left Yokosuka , Japan, in transit to Sasebo , Japan, from where she left on 11 January 1968, headed northward through the Tsushima Strait into the Sea of Japan. She left with specific orders to intercept and conduct surveillance of Soviet Union naval activity in the Tsushima Strait and to gather signal and electronic intelligence from North Korea. [9] On 20 January at 5:30 p.m.

(17:30), a North Korean modified SO-1 class Soviet style sub chaser passed within 4,000 yards (4 km) of the Pueblo, which was about 15.4 miles (24.8 km) southeast of Mayang-do at a position 39°47'N and 128°28.5'E. [1] In the afternoon of 22 January, the two North Korean fishing trawlers Rice Paddy 1 and Rice Paddy 2 passed within 30 yards (30 m) of Pueblo. That day, a North Korean unit made an assassination attempt against the South Korean President Park Chung-hee , but the crew of Pueblo were not informed. [1] According to the American account, the following day, 23 January, Pueblo was approached by a sub chaser and her nationality was challenged; Pueblo responded by raising the U.S. flag. The North Korean vessel then ordered it to stand down or be fired upon. Pueblo attempted to maneuver away, but was considerably slower than the sub chaser. Several warning shots were fired.

Additionally, three torpedo boats appeared on the horizon and then joined in the chase and subsequent attack.[ citation needed ] The attackers were soon joined by two MiG-21 fighters. A fourth torpedo boat and a second sub chaser appeared on the horizon a short time later. The ammunition on Pueblo was stored below decks, and her machine guns were wrapped in cold weather tarpaulins. The machine guns were unmanned, and no attempt was made to man them. An NSA report quotes the sailing order: (...) Defensive armament (machine guns) should be stowed or covered in such manner so that it does not cause unusual interest by surveyed units. It should be used only in the event of a threat to survival (...) and notes In practice, it was discovered that, because of the temperamental adjustments of the firing mechanisms, the .50-caliber machine guns took at least ten minutes to activate. Only one crew member, with former army experience, had ever had any experience with such weapons, although members of the crew had received rudimentary instructions on the weapons immediately prior to the ship's deployment. [1] Reported positions of USS Pueblo. North Korean chart showing where they claim to have captured USS Pueblo. U.S.

Navy authorities and the crew of the Pueblo insist that before the capture, Pueblo was miles outside North Korean territorial waters. North Korea claims the vessel was well within North Korean territory. The mission statement allowed her to approach within a nautical mile (1,852 m) of that limit. North Korea, however, claims a 50-nautical-mile (93 km) sea boundary even though international standards were 12 nautical miles (22 km) at the time. [10] The North Korean vessels attempted to board Pueblo, but she was maneuvered to prevent this for over two hours. A sub chaser then opened fire with a 57 mm cannon, killing one member of the crew. The smaller vessels fired machine guns into Pueblo, which then signaled compliance and began destroying sensitive material. The volume of material on board was so great that it was impossible to destroy it all. An NSA report quotes Lieutenant Steve Harris, the officer in charge of Pueblo's Naval Security Group Command detachment: :... we had retained on board the obsolete publications and had all good intentions of getting rid of these things but had not done so at the time we had started the mission.

I wanted to get the place organized eventually and we had excessive numbers of copies on board ... and concludes :Only a small percentage of the total classified material aboard the ship was destroyed. Radio contact between the Pueblo and the Naval Security Group in Kamiseya , Japan, had been ongoing during the incident. As a result, Seventh Fleet command was fully aware of Pueblo's situation. Air cover was promised but never arrived. The Fifth Air Force had no aircraft on strip alert, and estimated a two to three hour delay in launching aircraft. The USS Enterprise was located 510 nautical miles (940 km) south of the Pueblo, yet its four F-4B aircraft on alert were not equipped for an air-to-surface engagement. Enterprise's captain estimated that 1.5 hours (90 minutes) were required to get the converted aircraft into the air. [1] By the time President Lyndon B. Johnson was awakened, Pueblo had been captured and any rescue attempt would have been futile.[ citation needed ] Pueblo followed the North Korean vessels as ordered, but then stopped immediately outside North Korean waters. She was again fired upon, and a sailor, fireman Duane Hodges, was killed.

The ship was finally boarded at 0555 UTC (2:55 pm local) [11] by men from a torpedo boat and a sub chaser. Crew members had their hands tied, were blindfolded, beaten, and prodded with bayonets. Once Pueblo was in North Korean territorial waters, she was boarded again, this time by high-ranking North Korean officials.[ citation needed ] The first official confirmation that the ship was in North Korean hands came on January 28, 1968. Two days earlier a flight by a CIA A-12 Oxcart aircraft from the Project Black Shield squadron at Kadena, Okinawa flown by pilot Jack W. Weeks made three high altitude high speed flights over North Korea. When the aircraft's films were processed in the United States they showed Pueblo to be in the Wonsan harbor area surrounded by two North Korean vessels. [12] There was dissent among government officials in the U.S. regarding how to handle the situation. Rep. Mendel Rivers suggested the President issue an ultimatum for the return of Pueblo on penalty of nuclear attack, while Senator Gale McGee said the U.S.

should wait for more information and not make "spasmodic response[s] to aggravating incidents". [13] According to Horace Busby , Special Assistant to President Johnson, the President's "reaction to the hostage taking was to work very hard here to keep down any demands for retaliation or any other attacks upon North Koreans", worried that rhetoric might result in the hostages being killed. [14] Although American officials at the time assumed the seizure of the USS Pueblo had been directed by the Soviet Union, it has emerged in recent years that North Korea acted alone and the incident actually harmed North Korea's relations with most of the Eastern Bloc. [15] Aftermath Edit Pueblo was taken into port at Wonsan and the crew was moved twice to POW camps. The crew reported upon release that they were starved and regularly tortured while in North Korean custody. This treatment allegedly turned worse [16] when the North Koreans realized that crewmen were secretly giving them " the finger " in staged propaganda photos. [17] Commander Lloyd M. Bucher was psychologically tortured, such as being put through a mock firing squad in an effort to make him confess.

Eventually the Koreans threatened to execute his men in front of him, and Bucher relented and agreed to "confess to his and the crew's transgression." Bucher wrote the confession since a "confession" by definition needed to be written by the confessor himself. They verified the meaning of what he wrote, but failed to catch the pun when he said "We paean the DPRK [North Korea]. We paean their great leader Kim Il Sung". [18] [19] (The word " paean " sounds identical to the term "pee on" in American English.) Negotiations for the release of the crew took place at Panmunjom . At the same time, U.S. officials were concerned with conciliating the South Koreans, who expressed discontent about being left out of the negotiations. Richard A. Ericson, a political counselor for the American embassy in Seoul and operating officer for the Pueblo negotiations, notes in his oral history: The South Koreans were absolutely furious and suspicious of what we might do. They anticipated that the North Koreans would try to exploit the situation to the ROK's disadvantage in every way possible, and they were rapidly growing distrustful of us and losing faith in their great ally.

Of course, we had this other problem of how to ensure that the ROK would not retaliate for the Blue House Raid and to ease their growing feelings of insecurity. They began to realize that the DMZ was porous and they wanted more equipment and aid. So, we were juggling a number of problems. [20] He also noted how the meetings at Panmunjom were usually unproductive, due to the particular negotiating style of the North Koreans: As one example, we would go up with a proposal of some sort on the release of the crew and they would be sitting there with a card catalog... If the answer to the particular proposal we presented wasn’t in the cards, they would say something that was totally unresponsive and then go off and come back to the next meeting with an answer that was directed to the question. But there was rarely an immediate answer. That happened all through the negotiations. Their negotiators obviously were never empowered to act or speak on the basis of personal judgment or general instructions. They always had to defer a reply and presumably they went over it up in Pyongyang and passed it around and then decided on it.

Sometimes we would get totally nonsensical responses if they didn’t have something in the card file that corresponded to the proposal at hand. [20] Ericson and George Newman, the Deputy Chief of Mission in Seoul, wrote a telegram for the State Department in February, 1968, predicting how the negotiations would play out: What we said in effect was this: If you are going to do this thing at Panmunjom, and if your sole objective is to get the crew back, you will be playing into North Korea's hands and the negotiations will follow a clear and inevitable path. You are going to be asked to sign a document that the North Koreans will have drafted. They will brook no changes. It will set forth their point of view and require you to confess to everything they accuse you of... If you allow them to, they will take as much time as they feel they need to squeeze every damn thing they can get out of this situation in terms of their propaganda goals, and they will try to exploit this situation to drive a wedge between the U.S. and the ROK.

Then when they feel they have accomplished all they can, and when we have agreed to sign their document of confession and apology, they will return the crew. They will not return the ship. This is the way it is going to be because this is the way it has always been. [20] Following an apology, a written admission by the U.S. that Pueblo had been spying, and an assurance that the U.S. would not spy in the future, the North Korean government decided to release the 82 remaining crew members, although the written apology was preceded by an oral statement that it was done only to secure the release. [21] On 23 December 1968, the crew was taken by buses to the DMZ border with South Korea and ordered to walk south one by one across the " Bridge of No Return ". Exactly eleven months after being taken prisoner, the Captain led the long line of crewmen, followed at the end by the Executive Officer, Lieutenant Ed Murphy, the last man across the bridge. The U.S. then verbally retracted the ransom admission, apology, and assurance.

Meanwhile the North Koreans blanked out the paragraph above the signature which read: "and this hereby receipts for eighty two crewmen and one dead body".[ Clarification needed ] Bucher and all the officers and crew subsequently appeared before a Navy Court of Inquiry . A court-martial was recommended for the CO and the Officer in Charge of the Research Department, Lt. Steve Harris. But the Secretary of the Navy, John Chafee , rejected the recommendation, stating, "They have suffered enough." Commander Bucher was never found guilty of any indiscretions and continued his Navy career until retirement. [22] In 1970, Bucher published an autobiographical account of the USS Pueblo incident entitled Bucher: My Story. [23] Bucher died in San Diego on 28 January 2004, at the age of 76. James Kell, a former sailor under his command, suggested that the injuries suffered by Bucher during his time in North Korea contributed to his death. [22] Pueblo is still held by North Korea.

In October 1999, it was towed from Wonsan on the east coast, around the Korean Peninsula, to the port of Nampo on the west coast. This required moving the vessel through international waters, and was undertaken just before the visit of U.S. presidential envoy James Kelly to the capital Pyongyang. After the stop at the Nampo shipyard Pueblo was relocated to Pyongyang and moored on the Taedong River near the spot that the General Sherman incident is believed to have taken place. In late 2012 Pueblo was moved again to the Botong River in Pyongyang next to a new addition to the Fatherland Liberation War Museum. [24] Today Pueblo remains the second-oldest commissioned ship in the U.S. Navy, behind the USS Constitution ("Old Ironsides"). Pueblo is widely, but incorrectly, believed to be the first American ship to have been captured since the wars in Tripoli . On 8 December 1941, the river gunboat USS Wake was captured by Japanese forces while moored in Shanghai. Also, several US ships were captured by the British during the War of 1812.

The frigates USS Chesapeake was captured 1 June 1813 by the British frigate HMS Shannon . In 1814 the USS Tigress and USS Scorpion were captured in a night attack by British forces on Lake Huron. [25] Finally, the USS President was captured by a British squadron on 15 January 1815. I note that you will sign my document ... we have reached agreement. 23 December 1968 General Woodward on behalf of the United States signs the Three A's document and the DPRK at the same time allows the Pueblo prisoners to return to US custody. Tourist attraction Edit Pueblo is a primary tourist attraction in Pyongyang, North Korea, having attracted over 250,000 visitors since being moved to the Taedong River. [27] Pueblo used to be anchored at the spot where it is believed the General Sherman incident took place in 1866. In late November 2012 PUEBLO was moved from the Taedong river dock to a casement on the Botong river next to the new Fatherland War of Liberation Museum.

The ship was renovated and made open to tourists with an accompanying video of the North Korean perspective in late July 2013. To commemorate the anniversary of the Korean War, the ship had a new layer of paint added and was put on display at a museum. [28] Edit During an August 2005 diplomatic session in North Korea, former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Donald Gregg received verbal indications from high-ranking North Korean officials that the state would be willing to repatriate the Pueblo to United States authorities, on the condition that a prominent U.S. government official, such as the Secretary of State, come to Pyongyang for high level talks. While the U.S. government has publicly stated on several occasions that the return of the still commissioned Navy vessel is a priority, the current overall situation of U.S. and North Korean relations makes such an official state visit unlikely. [29] Lawsuit Edit Former Pueblo crew members William Thomas Massie, Dunnie Richard Tuck, Donald Raymond McClarren, and Lloyd Bucher sued the North Korean government for the abuse they suffered at its hands during their captivity. North Korea did not respond to the suit. In December 2008, U.S.

District Judge Henry H. Kennedy, Jr. in Washington, D.C. awarded the plaintiffs $65 million in damages, describing their ill treatment by North Korea as "extensive and shocking." [30] The plaintiffs, as of October 2009, were attempting to collect the judgment from North Korean assets frozen by the U.S. government. [31] Awards The USS Pueblo has earned the following awards - As FS-344: USS Pueblo in Pyongyang, North Korea Docked in Pyongyang, North Korea Giving a tour of an "armed spy ship of the U.S. imperialist aggression forces." A recent photo of the captain of the North Korean ship that captured the Pueblo on 23 January 1968 This is a Google-Earth satellite image of the U.S.S. Pueblo docked in Pyongyang Remember the Pueblo NY Times, July 19, 2005 By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF PYONGYANG, North Korea Moored on a river here in the North Korean capital is the U.S.S. Pueblo, described as an "armed spy ship of the U.S.

imperialist aggression forces." The Pueblo is the Navy ship that North Korea seized in 1968 in waters off the country's east coast, setting off an international crisis. One American sailor was killed and 82 others were imprisoned for nearly a year and tortured into writing confessions. To signal that the confessions were forced, the sailors listed accomplices like the television character Maxwell Smart. When forced to pose for a photo, some crew members extended their middle fingers to the camera, explaining to the North Korean photographer that this was a Hawaiian good luck sign. After the photo was published and the North Korean guards realized they'd been had, the sailors suffered a week of particularly brutal torture. As the first Navy vessel to surrender in peacetime since 1807, the Pueblo was a humiliation for America. And it has become a propaganda trophy for North Korea, with ordinary Koreans paraded through in organized tours to fire up nationalist support for the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il. Then Mr. Kim decided the propaganda would be even better if the ship was moved from the east coast to the capital.

So the Korean Navy disguised the Pueblo as a freighter, ran up the North Korean flag and sailed it for nine days through international waters around South Korea to the west coast of North Korea, and then up a river to Pyongyang. In 1999, the Pueblo opened triumphantly to crowds in Pyongyang. "When this ship left Wonsan port [on the east coast], Japanese ships mobilized to check it," said Col. Kim Jung Rok, who as a 28-year-old sailor helped storm the Pueblo and is now in charge of it. "But then they saw it was an ordinary freighter and withdrew." It's a bad sign that the Western intelligence experts who monitor North Korean ports and examine satellite images didn't notice that the Pueblo had moved. President Bush's refusal to engage North Korea, as the Clinton administration had done, has already led the North to revive plutonium production. Mr. Bush's backup plan is to stop North Korean nuclear proliferation by intercepting nuclear materials as they leave the country - but that's wishful thinking. If we couldn't detect the transfer of a famous 176-foot ship, it's ludicrous to think we could stop the smuggling of a grapefruit-size chunk of plutonium.

The Pueblo is also a reminder that Kim Jong Il is unrelenting in promoting nationalism - and hostility to the West - to keep himself in power. That prickly Korean nationalism - think of the French, cubed - offers the only shred of legitimacy the Dear Leader has. Many tens of thousands of ethnic Koreans in Japan support North Korea, not because they are Communists but because they are patriots - they see the Dear Leader as an authentic Korean nationalist, in contrast with the American quislings in the South. The biggest mistake America has made since World War II has been to misunderstand nationalism. That myopia now bolsters Kim Jong Il. When Bush administration officials rattle sabers at North Korea, they're helping to keep Kim Jong Il in power. Since the War of 1812, only two nations, Russia and China, have posed a major military threat to our home turf. Now North Korea, with its nuclear weapons and three-stage Taepodong missiles, is apparently joining that list, and emerging as a potential global eBay for anyone seeking plutonium. And our plans to deal with that problem by intercepting shipments are as loony as North Korea itself.

But the story of the Pueblo's capture also offers a hint of how to proceed. Initially, many Americans favored a hard line. The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, for example, urged dropping a nuclear bomb on one North Korean city. President Lyndon Johnson resisted, noting that bombing North Korea would not bring our hostages home. So the U.S. tried full-bore diplomacy. It was frustrating, slow and not wholly successful, but in the end was the best of a bunch of bad alternatives. It's time for us to learn from the Pueblo again. The Bush administration's dismissal of serious, direct diplomacy has made Korea more dangerous. Engagement may be arduous, frustrating and often unsatisfying, but it's the only option we have left. USS Pueblo, an 850-ton environmental research ship, was built at Kewaunee, Wisconsin, in 1944 as the the U.S. Army cargo ship FP-344. She was transferred to the Navy in April 1966 and renamed Pueblo.

Initially designated a light cargo ship (AKL-44), she soon began conversion to a research ship and was redesignated AGER-2 shortly before commissioning in May 1967. Following training operations off the U.S. west coast, in November 1967 Pueblo departed for the Far East to undertake electronic intelligence collection and other duties. The Pueblo, a tiny World War II-vintage supply ship newly reconditioned for spy service, sailed out of its home port of Yokosuka, Japan, on Jan. 5, 1968. After a brief stop at Sasebo Naval Base, Japan, the ship braved frigid temperatures and stormy seas for its maiden mission in the Sea of Japan, in international water about 15 miles off the coast of North Korea. The USS Pueblo was part of Operation Clickbeetle, the code-name for electronic and radio intelligence gathering by small non-combatant naval ships that operated close to potential enemies. The USS Pueblo had been tasked to collect signals intelligence in the Sea of Japan using the “cover” of conducting hydrographic research. Shortly after the operation got under way, the North Korean navy reacted with surprise and precision.

On 23 January 1968, while off Wonsan, North Korea, Pueblo was attacked by local forces and seized. Four North Korean torpedo boats circled the Pueblo and ordered it to follow them into port. Commander Lloyd "Pete" Bucher, the Pueblo's commanding officer tried to steer the ship farther out to sea, but the North Koreans opened fire, killing one crew member. Commander Bucher, armed only with a few .50-caliber machine guns aboard his slow vessel, surrendered the Pueblo after stalling his pursuers for sixty-five minutes. Inadequate destruction equipment and too much unnecessary classified material on board led to an intelligence coup for North Korea. The defensive cover that was to have been provided by the Navy and the Air Force in response to calls from the Pueblo never came.

The Navy and the Johnson administration missed all the indications and warnings that such a fate could befall the Pueblo, even after recognizing that the Pyongyang regime had violated the demilitarized zone more than fifty times, ambushed U.S and allied ground forces, attempted to assassinate the president of the Republic of Korea (with a secondary target to be the American embassy), and in the preceding nine months seized twenty South Korean fishing vessels for "entering North Korean territorial waters." The other eighty-two men on board were taken prisoner. The North Koreans contended that the ship had violated their territorial waters, a claim vigorously denied by the United States. After eleven months in captivity, often under inhumane conditions, Pueblo's crew were repatriated on 23 December 1968. The ship was retained by North Korea, though she is still the property of the U.S. Navy. She was exhibited at Wonsan and Hungham for three decades and before becoming a museum in the Taedong River near Ssuk Islet at Pyongyang, the North Korean capital city. The location had been the site where the American trading ship, the General Sherman, has been set on fire by the local population in 1866.

The vessel was moved in October 1999 to Nampo just before the vist of US presidential evnoy James Kelly to the capital. Harold Bowen, the Admiral who led the inquiry of the Pueblo incident died on 17 August 2000. Go Here to read his obituary. The Time the U.S. Nearly Nuked North Korea Over a Highjacked Spy Ship | Smart News | Smithsonian The Time the U.S. Nearly Nuked North Korea Over a Highjacked Spy Ship The Pueblo incident ended peacefully, but newly unclassified documents detail President Johnson's contingency plans smithsonian.com January 28, 2014 On January 23, 1968, the Navy's U.S.S. Pueblo was coasting in the waters off the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The boat had been sent by Rear Admiral Frank L. Johnson and its mission, approved by then-President Johnson's National Security Council, was to intercept communications from communist North Korea. As part of Cold War reconnaissance, the Navy and the National Security Agency wanted an update on North Korea's military, and the U.S.S.

Pueblo—a specialized spy ship packed with advanced sensors and sensitive encryption devices—was the tool for the job. For weeks the Pueblo sat , monitoring Korea's communications. On January 21, the ship was buzzed by a submarine chaser. The next day, a pair of fishing trawlers made an aggressive approach, but they, too, left without incident. A day later, say John Prados and Jack Cheevers, writing for the National Security Archive , the Korean navy showed up in force: Pueblo was not again approached until around mid-day on January 23, when a North Korean submarine chaser followed by three torpedo boats closed on her and ordered Bucher's ship to heave to. The American skipper turned his vessel toward the open sea but the Pueblo, a slow ship, had no chance of outrunning her pursuers and the North Korean warships opened fire with cannon and machineguns. The Pueblo was captured, taken to Wonsan, and Commander Bucher and his crewmen began 335 days in captivity.

The attack on the Pueblo, and the major threat it posed to American intelligence security, say Cheevers and Prados, sparked a flurry of brainstorming in the Johnson administration as to how the U.S. should respond. Through a series of recently declassified documents, dug up by Cheevers in preparation for his book, Act of War: Lyndon Johnson, North Korea, and the Capture of the Spy Ship Pueblo , Cheevers and Prados reconstruct the retaliations nearly doled out on the People's Republic of Korea . The Johnson administration considered several risky courses of action to retaliate for the Pueblo seizure. They included a blockade of North Korean ports, air strikes on military targets, an attack across the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas, a phony intelligence leak to the Soviets that the United States planned to attack North Korea, and a "show of force" by U.S. naval and air units outside the port of Wonsan, where the Pueblo was being held. President Johnson shot down these aggressive response plans, deciding instead that diplomacy was the best bet to get the Pueblo's crew home safe. But, says Ohio State University's Mitchell Lerner , Johnson did prepare a number of contingency plans.

One of these plans, detailed in a May 1968 document , revealed one particularly striking idea. Cheevers and Prados: In the tense aftermath of the Pueblo seizure, Pentagon war planners weighed using nuclear weapons to stop a possible communist invasion of South Korea, as well as mounting a massive air attack to wipe out North Korea's air force. The nuclear option, eerily codenamed "Freedom Drop," envisioned the use of American aircraft and land-based missiles to incinerate onrushing North Korean troops. “After 11 months of torture and starvation,” says USA Today , “the crew of the Pueblo was released in December 1968 after a series of negotiations with the North Koreans and a false apology by the United States. The crew returned home to a nation weary of war but overjoyed by their safe homecoming.” The USS Pueblo, however, stayed in North Korea. Over the summer, the ship was trotted out as part of a ceremony in Pyongyang—it's been painted, says UPI , and is now part of a war museum. Like this article?

Question: What was the name of the American spy-ship captured by the North Koreans on 24th January 1968?
Answer: U.S.S. PUEBLO